The present invention relates to a sleeve handling device.
In the past, the commercial production of shirt sleeves, particularly T-shirt sleeves has been quite labor-intensive and expensive. A sleeve blank is cut from a larger piece of cloth, and then is fed by hand to a forming station whereat a hem is formed along one edge of the blank. The hem blank is then commonly manually removed from the forming station, folded over by hand, and passed by hand under an automatic sewing machine to form an arcuate seam along an edge of the blank generally transverse to the hem. Since many more sleeve blanks can be hemmed per unit time by the formation station than can be seamed, usually two or three workers are necessary to effect seaming for each forming station. This results in the sleeve formation operation being very labor-intensive and relatively expensive, and a substantial floor area is required to accommodate the necessary workers and machinery.
A sleeve making device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,483,262, incorporated herein by reference. However, in this apparatus an arm is utilized to operate a cloth pickup device, and it is desirable to improve the accuracy of both the pickup of cloth from a first conveyor and the subsequent release of the cloth on a second conveyor in making the sleeve.